


two by two

by orphan_account



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Angst and Feels, Anxiety, Falling In Love, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Memory Loss, Mutual Pining, Suicidal Thoughts, Supernatural Elements, for them both, vv minor but just in case
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-07
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-18 08:28:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28615098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Kenma stares at the stranger -- plain black T-shirt, old jeans, rumpled hair -- trying his best to make something ring a bell, but there’s no moment of recognition. He’s just a strange, pathetic man who somehow made his way into Kenma’s bedroom (like it isn’t weird enough without Kenma phrasing it like that).Or: In his third year of high school, Kenma meets a man without a name who claims to be his best friend. Except that they’ve never met.
Relationships: Kozume Kenma/Kuroo Tetsurou
Comments: 10
Kudos: 46





	two by two

**Author's Note:**

> binge read the rest of hq last week … it was good. wrote most of this in 2017 and finished it this week LOL

AUGUST 09 2013 4:42 PM

Kenma is unused to irregularities. He is unused to interruptions on the train station platform, he is unused to being approached by strangers, and he is unused to dealing with their problems. Yet here he is, confronting all of those things at once. 

The man in front of him looks like he’s been running for hours. Sweat drips from his forehead -- or maybe it’s hair gel. Does hair gel melt? If it did, its victim would be this guy; half his hair sticks up in a haphazard mess while the other is slicked back on his head. 

“Oy! I finally caught up! Are you avoiding me now or what?” 

Kenma fumbles for a response, but the strange man continues before he can come up with a polite variation of _don’t bother me._

“Did you up and forget me in just three months?” 

His tone is teasing, but Kenma can’t catch the joke no matter how he tries to see it. Wildly, he looks around for cameras, but the few people at the platform look wholly uninterested.

“I think you’ve got the wrong person. Excuse me,” Kenma murmurs, picking up his bag, and tries to act like he’s going somewhere. 

The strange man hurries after him. “Wait. What did I do? Stop ignoring me!”

“...I honestly don’t know you.”

“It’s me, I’m” -- the strange man gestures wildly, but can’t seem to find the words -- “I’m.”

“Who are you?” 

The man’s face falls, the tilt to his amber eyes becoming even more pronounced, and Kenma feels suddenly disoriented. He turns away just as the strange man starts to speak.

“You’re Kenma,” he blurts out. “Kozume Kenma.”

Kenma starts at the use of his first name -- maybe he _should_ know this person. 

“Yes,” he says slowly. “I am.”

Silence follows, save for the clack of the approaching train, and Kenma stands up. He takes care not to make eye contact with the strange man. 

“That’s my train,” he announces to no one in particular. 

“Wait!” cries the strange man. A hand grabs the shoulder of Kenma’s jacket, and he tries to shake it off to no avail.

“I already told you I don’t know you.”

“But--!”

“Who are you?” Kenma asks for the second time. “What’s your name?”

He dares to make eye contact and is struck by an unprecedented and unfamiliar surge of fear. For a brief moment he feels dizzy, the stranger’s distraught face tilting before him. Then the train roars into the station and Kenma forces himself to move with the crowds. The strange man, for once, is completely still. 

“My name is…” 

Kenma strains his ears. Nothing. But then, just as the doors are beginning to close, a faint shout reaches him above the din of the train:

“Kenma, wait for me! _Kenma!”_

The strange man is at Kenma’s door. 

“Um.”

There are a thousand ways he could start this sentence -- _who are you, how did you know my address, get the fuck away from me,_ for starters — but nothing comes out of his mouth. On reflex alone, he closes the door. 

“Just hear me out!” the voice pleads, muffled by the door. 

Kenma is struggling enough as it is to keep it together. That’s twice now, _twice,_ that this spiky-haired, cat-eyed man has shouldered his way into Kenma’s personal space, and it seems now like this problem isn’t going to get away unless he does something. And his speciality has never been _doing things._

The voice from outside has gone silent. Kenma has the sudden hopeful thought that the strange man had realized he’d gotten the wrong person or perhaps just given up. But as he goes to the door to check, a piece of paper slides through the slit between the door and the carpet. 

It’s a photograph. The right edge is splotched brown with a coffee stain, and there’s a crease running diagonally through Kenma’s face -- wait -- that’s his _face_. He can’t be more than ten in this picture. He is standing in a park he doesn’t remember, next a kid he doesn’t remember with dark hair and a shit-eating grin. 

“It’s you?” Kenma addresses the door. “In the picture.”

“Of course!” 

Kenma doesn’t give himself time to think. He throws open the door and is greeted with the very same shit-eating grin.

“Hey, Kenma.”

“What’s your name?” he asks, another wasted effort, because although the strange man’s smile falters he doesn’t say anything. 

“How did you get here?” he tries again, and this time the strange man volunteers an answer:

“I got on the train behind you.”

“You were _following_ me?”

“Well, if you put it that way,” he says, sounding slightly bemused, “but I knew where to go anyway.”

“Because you were following me.”

“Well--”

“And you have a picture of me and you.”

“Yes,” he says, frustration edging into his voice, “and about that…”

“Even though we’ve never met --”

The strange man throws his hands in the air. “I don’t understand where this is coming from! What the hell did I do?!”

Kenma is floored. “I -- you --” 

_You followed me home and pretended like you knew me,_ he tries to say, but only ends up looking at the picture still clutched in his hand. Small Kenma glares at him, as if to remind him to act with a bit more tact. He of all people should know that he’s helpless at this sort of stuff.

“Is it because I didn’t call you enough? I know I said I’d come home some weekends but classes are way harder than I thought… “

“Absolutely none of this makes sense to me,” says Kenma. 

Kenma considers calling the police (or at least threatening to), and he probably would have, but those photographs throw a wrench into everything. How does he know this isn’t some deluded family friend?

“Just… come upstairs,” Kenma says, and the strange man’s face lights up.

What has he gotten himself into?

When they get to his room, the strange man looks around and frowns slightly.

“When did you change your bedspread?”

“L-last year.”

“How is third year, then? You feeling the stress yet?”

Kenma nods numbly.

“How was X and Y? Did you get it as soon as it came out?” 

“The day after.”

“That’s uncharacteristic of you.”

“I guess,” he says automatically, and only then realizes that he’s admitted to the strange man knowing his _character._

“You owe me an explanation,” Kenma says (finally), and watches the strange man’s gaze shift away from him. “Either that, or I’ll wake up now.”

He snorts. “If this was a dream, I would’ve woken up out of pure fucking shock hours ago.”

Kenma can’t figure out how to answer this, so he doesn’t. Luckily for him, the strange man continues without a moment’s hesitation. 

“Listen, I’ll apologize. I’ll literally get on my knees. I don’t know _what_ I did but you’ve been ignoring me to the point where I hauled my ass over to Tokyo only to find you spouting some bullshit about not remembering me.”

The strange man’s expression grows even more pleading. Kenma briefly considers “forgiving” him if it means getting him out of his hair, but that would probably open up a whole new host of problems. But before he can fully tease out the prospect, Kenma has a sudden idea, one that will hopefully get this problem off his back once and for all. He opens up his phone and hands it to the strange man.

“Look through it yourself. You’re not there -- whoever you are.”

“Bullshit, I’m sure you just…” But he trails off as a scrolls through to the end of his contacts. “You deleted the conversation, didn’t you.”

“ _No._ It was never there in the first place,” he says through gritted teeth.“Listen. If you know me like you say you do -- I’m a shit liar.”

He opens his mouth as if to argue, but stops short. 

“You are, but…”

“There’s no ‘but’. I don’t know who you are.”

And for the first time, the strange man bites his lip and remains silent. 

Kenma stares at him -- plain black T-shirt, old jeans, rumpled hair -- trying his best to make something ring a bell, but there’s no moment of recognition. He’s just a strange, pathetic man who somehow made his way into Kenma’s bedroom. (Like it isn’t weird enough _without_ Kenma phrasing it like that.)

“I’m being serious,” Kenma says finally. “I don’t… listen, you won’t even tell me your name.”

“You should _know_ my name!”

“I don’t remember…” 

“I mean, you’re _Kenma._ You -- I literally couldn’t believe it when you didn’t recognize me at the station.”

“And _I_ can’t believe that I let a stranger who knows my full name and room decoration history into my house.”

“I threw up on that bedspread when I was ten,” he says shortly. “Of course I remember it.”

Kenma doesn’t even have it in him to question him anymore. 

“I have more pictures,” the strange man ventures after a moment, pulling a few more wrinkled photos from his pocket and handing them to Kenma. “Are you _sure_ you don’t remember?”

Kenma studies the pictures. In one, they are barely teenagers, crouched in front of a stray cat, fascination mirrored in each other’s faces as Kenma reaches out a tentative hand. In the next they are toddlers, and the strange man -- the strange _boy_ ’s face is scrunched up as he blows out a birthday candle. And in the final one Kenma is not more than a year younger than he is now, rolling his eyes at the mirror image of the man standing across from him right now. They’re wearing some kind of sports uniform. 

“This is impossible,” he says after a long moment. “I don’t even play sports.”

The strange man’s mouth drops open. “You don’t play _volleyball?_ ”

Kenma shakes his head. He’s never been the athletic type. But somehow, this man who seems so closely acquainted with Kenma’s habits and _character_ is completely floored. 

“Never? Not even when you were little?” he plows on, and Kenma shakes his head again. 

“But -- but --” 

The strange man glances wildly around the room, as if there was something he could find that would let him out of this horrible delusion. Or maybe -- _Kenma’s_ the deluded one here. His ears are beginning to ring. Shakily, he finds his desk chair and sits down. 

The strange man begins to pace back and forth, muttering to himself about _volleyball_ and _not remembering,_ and finally plops down on the carpet like it’s his own and buries his face in his hands. Kenma doesn’t dare to move or even speak. 

Eventually, he begins his homework (a rarity) if only to keep his eyes from straying to the stranger on his floor. He wishes he could forget about him as easily as the names and faces of his classmates slip from his mind, but something about the strange man has lodged itself in the pit on his stomach. There are too many signs of familiarity, a jarring closeness that sends prickles down his spine --

“Hey, Kenma.”

Like _that._ How is he supposed to react to someone who doesn’t know his own first name calling Kenma by his own? 

“Should I leave?”

 _Yes,_ he almost says without hesitation, but he takes a brief moment to look at the strange man, too big for the tiny space he’s occupying, and some of the restlessness inside him stills. 

“What kind of a question is that?”

“To you, I’m a stranger,” he says, gaze trained firmly on the leg of Kenma’s desk. “I can leave just as easily as I showed up.”

“Do you even have anywhere to go?” Kenma blurts out. 

He immediately regrets it when the strange man’s face crumples, but it is a split-second movement, and just a moment later he’s back to normal. Shit-eating grin and all.

“We’ll see if my mom has the decency to remember me. I mean, she did yesterday, but who even knows at this point?” 

“Well, you’re not staying with me.” Kenma pulls his chair closer to the desk and tucks his knees up to his chin. Through the window’s reflection, he can see the strange man’s strange features without hindrance. “I have a family. And everything. I know you think you know me, but --”

The stranger stands up. Kenma has screwed himself over once again by speaking too much. _I know you think you know me._

“I _do_ know you,” he insists. “I know you better than anyone else on this damn planet.” 

What a statement to make. 

“I don’t… I can’t figure out your name for you, or why you’re here, or who you are. So… I don’t know. Maybe see a doctor.”

The strange man mutters something under his breath, shaking his head disbelievingly, and the pit in Kenma’s stomach grows until he’s forced to turn away from him. The door closes softly, and Kenma wants nothing more than to dissolve into the window’s empty reflection.

For one week and three days, everything is normal.

Kenma doesn’t meet any strangers on the train ride to school. He is not assaulted by claims of best friendship in class. The empty station platform on the ride home remains just that.

He shakes off the strange incident as some sort of hallucination, a fever dream (although he didn’t have a fever, nor was he dreaming). Everybody has weird shit like that happen to them at some point in life, right? He sees it all the time on the internet, _a ghost in my closet_ here or _something is watching me sleep_ there. He stuffs the photos into the depths of his desk and pretends they don’t exist.

Kenma’s delusion comes to an abrupt end in the convenience store just after midnight. He’d been hungry, and only halfway finished with his homework, and had managed to sneak out of the house only to find himself face-to-face with a frighteningly familiar stranger.

The second he sees him, Kenma whirls around before he can question whether it was the sleep deprivation talking, but he can’t blame the very real hand that grabs his wrist on his fatigued imagination. He focuses on a shelf of instant noodles and tries not to freak out. 

“Kenma,” he starts (his voice is also very real, much to Kenma’s dismay).

“Please let go of me.” He struggles to keep his voice even.

“I just want to talk.”

“I thought you said you were leaving.”

If he hadn’t been facing away from him, he probably wouldn’t have been able to be so direct. But the strange man doesn’t seem to care ( _because he’s used to it,_ some voice in him whispers).

“I _am,_ I mean, I left,” he says, trying to cut around to Kenma’s front. “I’m not going to show up at your house again. Promise.

“Pinky swear?” he ventures after Kenma remains silent.

The strange man actually waves his pinky finger in front of Kenma’s face, and he is suddenly confronted with the very different problem of trying not to laugh. Were they twelve-year-olds?

 _Yes,_ Kenma realizes, his heart lurching as he remembers the creased photos, _at some point, we were._

“I’ll buy you a drink if you let us talk for, like, two minutes,” the strange man says. “Alright, a drink _and_ a snack.”

Kenma considers. 

“Your choice. Although I could probably guess what --”

“Two minutes only,” he says, dodging the strange man as he dives for him in joy. 

He almost buys something completely different than usual just to throw off the strange man, but that would be cutting his nose to spite his face, anyway. So he sucks it up as he cracks open his soda and the strange man grins infuriatingly down from above him. 

“Should you really be drinking caffeine this late?” he asks as they step out of the harsh fluorescent light of the convenience store into the darkness.

“Shouldn’t you know my habits, too?”

“There, see, you admit it. I know you,” he says with an easy smile as they sit down on a park bench.

“Only because you’re forcing the issue down my throat.”

“Speaking of the issue.”

Kenma takes a sip of his soda, feeling it burn his throat, and waits for the strange man to continue.

“My parents remember me. And so do my old school friends.”

“That’s good.”

“I asked about you.”

“Okay.”

“They didn’t know who you were.”

“Good to know.”

He laughs awkwardly. “I guess it was wishful thinking, pretending that it was some elaborate prank.”

“Part of me _still_ thinks this is a prank,” Kenma replies.

The strange man sighs and tilts his head back to the streetlight above him. Kenma follows his gaze, and together they watch a moth darting back and forth. 

“I guess why I’m here, is that I’m asking for help.”

“How could I even help you?” 

He shrugs. “I don’t know, Kenma. Just… tell me I’m not crazy.”

“Right now, my most plausible explanation for all this is that you’re crazy.”

“Typical,” he snorts. “Those photos were real, weren’t they?”

In truth, he hasn’t looked at them since the strange man left his house. But he remembers them clearly enough.

“... Yeah.” 

“And it was you, and it was me.”

“Yeah.”

“We were best friends.”

“I don’t… “

“Remember me, I _know._ ” The strange man runs a hand through his hair, so that it sticks up even more than usual. “You don’t remember, but I was the one who taught you how to ride a bike. I split my head open trying to slide down your banister and had to get eight stitches. I was there when you cut your own hair for the first time.”

Kenma twists a clump of hair between his fingers. He can’t remember a thing about the first time he cut it, let alone who was or wasn’t with him.

“What are you trying to say?” 

He throws his hands in the air. “I don’t know! I just didn’t anticipate losing you in _this_ sort of way.”

 _In what sort of way?_ Kenma wants to ask, but what comes out instead is, “Two minutes are up.” 

He stands up, and the strange man is slouched there on the bench like he’s lived there his entire life, and for a fraction of a second Kenma can almost see the little kid from the pictures. All at once, the surreality of this entire situation hits him. The moth and streetlight and the strange man warp briefly into something too bright, too twisted, and when he blinks lights burst in an array of colors behind his eyes.

And the horrible thing is, in that moment, Kenma feels the strange man’s defeated exhaustion, his helplessness, so acutely that his heart twists, more painful and sharp than the way his stomach ties into knots when he has to speak in front of the class. This is an empathy he cannot help but feel.

“Just… come to my house tomorrow evening. We’ll figure something out.”

The strange man’s face lights up. “Really?”

“I’ve got to finish my homework now.” Kenma tugs his hoodie tighter around his shoulders. “Thanks for the drink, I guess.”

And that is the first in what will probably be a very long saga of _Kenma Cannot Say No._ He should probably start hiring a screenwriter for the movie already. 

Kenma doesn’t expect his mother to be home when the doorbell rings. but the strange man handles it easily with some noise about a school project. Yet again, Kenma feels a jolt of unease about how comfortable he is around his mother, in his house. (As if he’d been there before.)

He bursts into Kenma’s room without asking with a brief “hi” and nearly plops down beside him on the bed before stopping himself. Kenma chews on the inside of his cheek and hopes that the strange man will carry the conversation for him. He’s still not entirely sure why he signed up for this. 

“Let’s see those photos,” says the strange man, and Kenma obliges. 

He sits down at his desk and pulls them out, turning them over a couple times in his hand. He tries to process it once again -- the birthday party, the sports uniforms. 

“That’s the part that unnerves me the most,” says Kenma, “because I don’t even have any uniforms. Even if I’d somehow forgotten that I played, there’s no missing that …”

But the strange man isn’t listening. He’s busy peering at the back of the sports uniform one. Curious, Kenma turns it over and is startled to find a short note written in black marker.

“Didn’t you notice?” says Kenma. 

“I hardly looked before I gave them to you. Didn’t _you_ see?”

“No,” he replies, refusing to admit that he’d been too panicked to even acknowledge that the photos existed until today.

 _We made it to nationals!!!_ reads the note, accompanied by a silly little kaomoji. Then they’d both signed -- well, Kenma had, certainly, but there was another four-character scribble that could only belong to the strange man. 

“I can’t read half of this, your handwriting’s really bad,” says Kenma. “... Is that the character for black? Kuro something something rou.”

“Let me see it.” The strange man snatches it back, but even he is stumped. “I can’t, uh, read this. But my friends called me Kuroo, and my mother called me Tetsu - so Tetsurou?”

“Kuroo Tetsurou,” says Kenma slowly, trying to spark some sort of recognition. But there’s nothing. If anything, it makes the strange man an irrevocably real person now, which scares Kenma more than anything else.

“I like the sound of it,” says the strange man -- says Kuroo, his face splitting into that wide grin.

“It should be a familiar sound.”

“I think you and I both have come to understood that my name is one of the many things missing from my life right now.”

“One of _two_ things.”

“Not true. You comprise many things: the greatest cause of my headaches, my snack source, my bestest friend.”

Kenma stares at him. “Did you seriously just say _bestest_?”

“It’s a better adjective than _best.”_

“Neither is necessary.”

Now Kuroo takes the liberty of sitting down on his bed, as if knowing his name somehow grants him special privileges. 

“Who was your first best friend?”

“Evidently, you. Now get off my bed.”

He ignores him and sprawls out further. “I mean -- who was the first best friend you remember?”

“None,” he mumbles, trying not to flush with embarrassment. “I’m not… “

“A very social person,” Kuroo finishes, never losing that laid-back tone, that lazy smile. “You don’t need to get worked up over it.”

“I’m notall that worked up.”

“You are.”

“Am not.”

“Are too.”

“Am not.”

“Am not.”

“Are too -- goddamnit,” says Kenma, realizing his mistake. “You have the advantage of presumably doing this to me before.”

“Actually, I think you did it first. Think of it as revenge.”

“Did I?” wonders Kenma, and everything starts to click. 

Kuroo’s mouth drops open. “Did you re--”

“No, I just… “ Kenma gestures vaguely. “I wasn’t able to consider it before because it’s all so outlandish, but maybe I’m not the Kenma you know.”

“That’s bullshit,” says Kuroo swiftly. “Your room, mannerisms, style of dress --”

“I don’t mean the wrong name. I mean the wrong _Kenma._ ”

“I still don’t get it.”

“It’s the only plausible explanation -- it would explain why I don’t have the sports uniform or why I don’t have any pictures of you. It’s not that I forgot, it’s that you don’t belong with this me. In this...world.”

The second Kenma says it out loud, he begins to doubt himself, but it’s not like he’s limited by what he would have considered realistic a week ago. Hell, Kuroo could claim he’d come back from the dead, and Kenma wouldn’t blink an eye at this point.

“Oh,” mouths Kuroo, and the smile literally melts off his face.

“Do you know how you ended up here?” Kenma asks.

“I just took the train,” insists Kuroo. “No change or anything. Well, I was sleeping on the train, so I might’ve missed it, but no sketchy business.

“Are you sure?” says Kuroo after a pause, and he sounds almost hopeful.

Kenma shrugs. “I’m not sure of anything.”

“Couldn’t it be that you forgot me? Isn’t that what we thought this was?”

“The first theory just makes more sense.”

“Oh, okay, parallel universes trump spacetime warping. Good to know,” Kuroo snorts.

“ _Relatively_ more sense,” amends Kenma. “It accounts for the erasure of events that would have happened if you’d been around. Also, why are you still on my bed?”

“Because there is only one bed in this room.”

“There is also a floor.”

“Listen, Kenma, I _belong_ on this bed. This bed is practically mine. When I was six years old --”

Now, Kenma may not know anything about whatever fucked-up situation they’re in, but he is completely sure that no version of him would give up the only good things in his life (sleep, blankets) to some crazy universe-traveling best friend. 

“When you were six years old, I probably booted you off this bed all the same.”

Kuroo holds up his hands in surrender as he slides off the bed. “Just trying to milk it.”

“You forget that this is still me. And I know me better than you know me, parallel universes aside.”

“I wonder about that,” Kuroo hums.

Kenma is long since done with this conversation, so he feigns disinterest (is it feigning if the reason he’s disinterested is because he is completely and utterly terrified of the subject?) and pulls out his 3DS. He half-expects Kuroo to begin bothering him again, but he wanders off to some corner of the room and occupies himself with some manga lying around. So he’s at least vaguely familiar with the concept of personal space, then. That’s a relief. 

His mind wanders -- this is the third time he’s playing this game, waiting for the next one to come out -- and he wonders if they used to, _no,_ if the other Kenma and Kuroo used to just share a space like this. And if Kuroo thinks that doing the exact same thing to him will magically turn Kenma back into whoever he’s supposed to be. 

“I can’t believe this,” Kuroo says as he slinks up behind him, jostling for a place on the bed. He can’t believe he ever had the fleeting thought that Kuroo was aware of his boundaries. “Did you seriously not realize the tail lights up before it attacks?”

_\--“You’re usually observant about that sort of stuff, Kenma.”--_

It’s only a split second, barely audible, but Kenma swears he just heard a voice. Right after Kuroo spoke --?

“Kenma?”

“Of course I realized,” he snaps. “How else would I have been able to beat the enemy in the lower levels?”

“That’s right, this _is_ a higher level.”

“What?”

“When I gave you the advice last year, you were still just starting the game…” says Kuroo, trailing off into yet another fond memory.

Maybe all Kuroo had been good for was helping him out with his games. But even as he thinks it, he knows it’s not true. Kuroo is obnoxious, but he’s not stupid -- he couldn’t be sticking to him so closely unless they really had been close.

He can’t imagine acting even remotely like this if he was in Kuroo’s place. He frankly can’t imagine doing anything but walking away and moving on. Maybe it’s because he’s never had a best friend -- and though his heart twists just slightly at the thought, it passes quickly; he’s already fought that battle with himself. This is how he’s always been, and he’s fine --

“You’re fine, aren’t you?”

Kenma spares Kuroo a quick glance; his back is turned as he sifts through some of Kenma’s old school binders. He doesn’t even know where Kuroo found them. 

“Fine with what?”

“You’re… pretty much the same. Stubborn, prickly, ready to pick a fight --”

“You’ve never seen me pick a fight.’

“But you _do_ , in your weird unassuming way. I can tell just by looking.”

Kenma rolls his eyes (even if Kuroo is right, kind of). “Your point is?”

He shelves the notebook he’s reading and pulls out another one. “My point is nothing. I’m just making an observation that you’re doing just fine.”

“Thanks for the reassurance,” he says dryly. “I desperately needed it.”

“Oh, shut up.” He pauses briefly, then adds, “Maybe it’s for my purposes.”

“I thought you already had a doctorate degree in my behavioral habits.”

“I’m just confirming a suspicion of mine.”

Kenma doesn’t know what to make of this, so he stays silent, hoping Kuroo will fill him in. But instead, he tosses the school binders into one of the many boxes under Kenma’s desk and stands up.

“For your information, you wanted to be a gamer when you were eight.”

“I already knew that. Are you leaving?”

“Thanks for the love.”

 _I didn’t mean it like that_ , he thinks, but doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t want Kuroo to get even the slightest impression that he’s more welcome than he’s making himself already, even if it means Kenma will actually have to speak up to find out what he wants. 

“Kuroo, what was your suspicion?” 

He stops halfway to the door and turns around. He’s not smiling, not even a little, and that somehow throws his whole face out of proportion. 

“I don’t think it’s something you could comprehend.”

“Ouch,” says Kenma, knowing he doesn’t sound the least bit hurt. 

Weirdly enough, though, Kuroo does. The way he calls out his goodbyes is distant and spaced-out, as though he’s on autopilot, and Kenma finds himself thinking about him long after he’s gone -- Kuroo and the world in which he doesn’t belong. 

It hits just close enough to home to be a little painful.

“So we’re at the point where you let yourself into my room unasked?” 

Kenma thinks that, more often than not, Kuroo forgets that this isn’t the life he’s used to. Either that, or he has absolutely no concept of personal space even with near strangers.

“I’m just lonely,” complains Kuroo. 

“Then get used to it,” says Kenma, a little more coldly than he’d intended. 

“Indulge me.” Kuroo rolls off the bed and lands on a heap on the floor. “Let’s go play volleyball.”

 _Is he crazy?_ “I have homework.”

“That sure doesn’t stop you from playing video games until dinnertime.”

“Those are at least mildly interesting to me.”

“Volleyball is interesting,” says Kuroo, perking up. “You like it. You’re good at it.”

Kenma shoots him a skeptical look. He doesn’t know how much Kuroo is exaggerating, but he sure doesn’t see himself jumping and shouting with a bunch of two-meter-tall boys. 

“You’re a setter. You organize the plays, you’re the control tower… you’re our brain.”

“Listen, stop that…”

“We are the body's blood. Flow smoothly and circulate oxygen so the brain functions normally,” says Kuroo distantly. Kenma gets the sense that he stopped listening to him the second he started talking about volleyball.

“Kuroo, I said --”

“Hey. Do me a favor. Pretty _please._ ” 

Kuroo leaps up and grabs Kenma’s shoulders. He’s forced to look away, and not just because of the proximity and eye contact -- something about seeing that infuriating smile up close, those amber eyes wide…

“Let’s go see the volleyball club.”

“No.”

“Oh, Kenma, treasure of my heart, beloved setter, recipient of a -- of a… “ Kuroo trails off, and if Kenma looks closely he can actually see him flush a little pink. “Sorry. I got ahead of myself.”

“Recipient of a what?” 

“A… free pork bun after practice,” mumbles Kuroo. “It was --”

(-- _clack, clack, cell phone, static --)_

“-- something I used to do to get you to go to morning practice.”

“Oh,” says Kenma, still trying to process that split-second memory which escaped him as quickly as he’d gotten it. Where had that come from?

“So? Yes or no?”

“ _No_ ,” insists Kenma. “Also, leave.”

“I could if I would. Back to a Kenma who doesn’t hate having me around,” Kuroo huffs.

“I’m sure he misses you very much.” Kenma flops on the bed and grimaces; it’s warm from where Kuroo was lying on it. “It sounds like you need each other to survive.”

Kuroo inhales sharply, as if he’s about to say something, but instead edges his way towards Kenma.

“I’m going to stake out the volleyball club. And you are definitely coming with me.”

“I said I’m not coming.” Kenma rolls onto his side. “Are you pathetic enough to not be able to go alone?”

“Are _you_ pathetic enough to be scared shitless about seeing something you might’ve actually been good at?”

“I just don’t want to --”

But he is cut off by Kuroo picking him up and effortlessly swinging him over his shoulder. He should be panicking, but all he feels is a marked annoyance. 

“Like carrying a limp cat,” remarks Kuroo, and Kenma tries to kick his balls.

By the time Kuroo sets him down, they’re already outside, and at this point it would be more effort to fight to get back to his room. Honestly, Kenma doesn’t give a flying fuck. He has no interest in seeing the club he was supposed to be a member of. He has no interest in hearing Kuroo rant about some team that he was supposed to be interested in. In fact, he has no interest in Kuroo himself, always invading Kenma’s space and trying to be _friends_ with him. 

This feeling that hasn’t abandoned him since Kuroo barged into his life, the tug of unease mixed with a strange disorientation -- it’s nothing but a hindrance.

By the time Kenma is back in the present, they’re already at campus. The sports fields that Kenma has never set foot on look so alive -- students darting back and forth, yelling, laughing. Kuroo spots the gym where they play volleyball easily, and Kenma has to physically restrain him from sprinting towards it. 

“They won’t be done yet, it’s only five,” pleads Kuroo.

“I don’t want to be caught sneaking around here with a suspicious university student,” Kenma grumbles. “So stop acting so stupid.”

Kuroo pouts but obeys him, and together they find an empty side of the school where they can kneel down and peer through the vent. At first, Kenma can only see sneakers darting back and forth across shiny hardwood, but then he cranes his neck and catches sight of a tall, sweeping movement, a body arcing through the air.

_WHAM._

“Nice kill, Tora! That’s it!”

“Let’s go, let’s go…”

“Inuoka, watch your stance!”

“Fukunaga, are you looking at the ball or at Shibayama’s ass?”

Kuroo is watching all of this raptly, the back-and-forths, the fast-paced plays, and for once he is completely silent. Then, the team calls a meeting, and he loses it when he sees who’s leading it -- the one with a mohawk who talks like a gang member.

“It’s fucking Tora?”

“Keep your voice down!” Kenma hisses.

“I can’t believe it, I thought for _sure_ Fukunaga was gonna be your vice so why isn’t he captain now? I know he’s quiet, and a real fuckin’ weirdo, but --”

“Wait. _My_ vice?”

Kuroo blinks. “Yeah. You were in line to be captain for sure.”

Kenma shakes his head. “I’m not going to trust anything you say.”

“You’re their backbone, Kenma! Their brain! They’re fucking losers without us! I’m gonna drag you there _right now_ and make you sign up, because they hardly have a chance at the prefectural tournament looking like that.”

“I said to _stop that_.”

“Stop what?”

“Referring to it in the present tense. As if it’s… still happening. I’m not a setter or whatever. And I’m not anyone’s backbone.”

Kuroo laughs, but it’s not his usual wheezing, barking monstrosity. It’s faint, halfhearted, and when Kenma turns to look at him, his face seems just the slightest bit sad.

“Not anyone’s backbone, are you?”

A wind just short of winter weather assaults them both, and Kenma buries his face in his sweatshirt. He can’t see Kuroo’s expression like this, only his long, veined hands knotted around the half-withered grass. He watches another player shoot upwards, swiping towards the ceiling, and feels nothing but a horrible sense of defeat.

“I -- let’s just go.”

“Fine.” Kuroo hauls himself to a standing position and offers Kenma a hand. With considerable effort, he takes it. It’s the least he can do for not being able to be anyone’s brain or spine or whatever.

They’re circling around the front of the gym when the tall kid that hit the first ball comes bounding outside with a water bottle. Realizing who it is, Kenma tries to shrink further into his sweatshirt. It's Haiba Lev, some kid he helped get a cat out of a tree last year. Despite Kenma’s best efforts not to, they’d somehow become acquainted -- most likely because of Lev’s insufferable friendliness and enthusiasm. 

“Oh, Kozume-senpai!” he calls, blocking their path (so much for trying to get out unnoticed). “What are you doing here? I didn’t know you played sports!”

“I don’t…but this guy does,” Kenma fields, jerking a thumb at Kuroo. “He wanted to… see the campus.”

Lev turns his attention to Kuroo, and when he sees him he practically jumps out of his shoes. Kenma’s stomach lurches — he’d forgotten Kuroo knew the volleyball team.

“ _Senpai!_ What are you doing here? Are you home for break? Why are you with Kozume-senpai?”

“Yeah, I’m here for summer break! Are you guys training hard?”

He’s deftly dodged the question about Kenma, and Lev takes the bait, going on and on about this and that and the national tournament. He seems like the kind of kid Kenma wouldn’t be able to stand for more than fifteen minutes straight.

And yet, according to Kuroo, he was able to stand him for three years. In the time that Kuroo keeps resolutely calling _before_ , as if it was a simple reversal of time and not a complete erasure of his life, he had found something worth fighting for among these sweaty boys and squeaky floors. It’s more than he can say for his current self, at least, and for the first time Kenma feels a brief sense of longing -- if not for that life, but for the concrete knowledge of what had happened _before._

“Kuroo. Let’s go,” he says.

Kuroo is lingering outside the gym, chatting it up with Lev and the mohawk guy, and Kenma can’t be bothered to keep trying. It’s not like Kuroo is unfamiliar with this town, anyway, so he slinks off on his own. With every step he takes, his stomach twists a little more, as if he should feel guilty for leaving him behind. 

Of course, he needn’t feel that way, especially since Kuroo catches up with him in no time flat, his face suffused with energy. No matter how Kenma tries, he can’t avoid looking at him.

“See? Did you see them? It was so much fun, and I’ve graduated anyway, but you still have a chance… did you know you and Lev used to be really good buddies? Everyone liked you best, actually, ‘cause we all relied on you -- Kenma? Are you okay?”

He focuses on the trembling line of Kuroo’s chin and tries to control his voice.

“Can you do me a favor and leave me alone?”

Kuroo wilts, but doesn’t complain. “For how long?”

 _Forever,_ thinks Kenma. He just wants things to go back to how things used to be -- before Kuroo, before volleyball, before the idea of a backbone and a life outside of the comfortable monotony he’s so accustomed to.

He wants things to go back to how they used to be, but for once in his life there is somebody else to consider. Kenma thinks of their conversation on the streetlit park bench and that raw edge to Kuroo’s voice, the familiar note that had spurned Kenma to open his mouth.

“Just… two days. Come back in two days, and you’re not allowed to talk about volleyball.”

Maybe he has to set aside this leaden sense of panic that’s urging him to push everyone away, because for now, somebody needs him around. 

Kenma can’t say he likes the responsibility.

. . .

JANUARY 7 2013 7:03 AM

 _“I_ do _know you.”_

Four words and a petulant frown. That’s all Kenma can remember from his dream last night, and it’s driving him nuts. It was one of those dreams that had seemed to go on for years and years, but when he looks at the time it has only been thirty minutes since he fell back asleep after smashing his alarm into silence. 

Perfectly on time, his phone rings. Kenma picks up without even checking who it is. 

_“Did you fall back asleep again?”_

“Yeah, sorry.” Kenma looks at the time. Too late to bother rushing to go get ready. “Just go on without me. I’ll skip morning practice today.”

_“The captain’s going to kill you.”_

Kenma snorts. “It’s okay. The _captain_ ’s always mad at me anyway.”

_“For good reason. Not all captains are content to babysit all day.”_

“Hey…” Kenma stops and swallows his words. He doesn’t want to open up a can of worms. 

_“What?”_

“Never mind. It’s a stupid question.” 

_“You can’t just leave me hanging like that!”_

“Yes, I can.” 

_“Oh, Kenma, treasure of my heart, beloved setter, recipient of a free pork bun after evening practice--”_

“Is something up with your voice?”

There’s a short silence. Kenma can hear the faint clack of dishes in the background. 

_“No. It’s the same as always. Why do you ask?”_

“Just --” _I_ do _know you._ Kenma feels oddly nauseous. _Better than anyone else on this damn planet…_ “It’s stupid. There’s a reason I didn’t ask it.”

_“Oh, whatever. I’ve got to go. No ditching for the next week, okay?”_

“Yeah, whatever. See you.”

But he can’t shake the feeling that something is _off_ about -- well, everything -- the carpet, the books on his desk, the bedspread he’d been meaning to get replaced since Kuroo threw up on it six years ago. But with every step, the sensation dissipates, and by the time he reaches the bathroom he is left with only a vague unease.

In hindsight, he probably could have made it to morning practice if he’d jogged a little. Whatever. It’s been months since he last slept in, and a weird dream is as good an excuse to himself as any to catch a break. 

They aren’t edgy anime characters, so they don’t eat lunch on the roof (although Kenma has to admit he kind of likes the idea) -- they eat in the courtyard, cross-legged on the dusty ground, leaning against the wall.

Kuroo is alternating between eating and reciting facts about the respiratory system from memory. It’s part of the systematic revision he’s been doing for his entrance exams. He’s always doing three things at once: eating, talking to Kenma, and studying, volleyball, talking to Kenma, and studying, texting his friends, talking to Kenma, and studying. He probably even studies while sleeping.

It’s an exhausting way to go about things, probably, but it seems like Kuroo is enjoying it well enough. They’re going to nationals, after all, and Kenma knows that if if there’s one thing that would get Kuroo to power through, it’s the thought of the team he molded dominating at Tokyo.

Maybe Kenma should be feeling that same enthusiasm -- though he probably will, once he’s on the court. But for now, he just wishes the weather was a little warmer. That he’d slept a little better. 

“Breathing is the process of air moving from an area of higher pressure to lower pressure, did you know that? When you breathe in there’s less pressure in your lungs, so it just goes _whoosh_ \-- you’re not really breathing. The air is kind of doing it for you.”

“I already knew that. We learned it in first year.”

“Yeah, but it’s still neat, isn’t it?”

“I guess. You should really be going for breadth instead of depth, though.”

“Haha, _breadth._ That’s a good one.”

Kenma shoots him a look. Kuroo mumbles something about it not being his fault that Kenma had no sense of humour and returns to his biology notes. Kenma somewhat wants to provoke him, maybe to pass the remaining eight minutes of their lunch block, but also maybe because every time Kuroo falls silent, the memories of the eerie dream he’d had last night settle over him.

It’s not like there’s much to remember, but he’s unused to remembering anything at all -- his dreams are, if anything, a warped sequence of bright colors, vague sounds of sneakers squeaking, voices calling out to him. He can’t imagine what shook him enough to force his mind to freak him out this much. 

“ _Kenma.”_

He starts, realizing by the tone of Kuroo’s voice that he’d been tuning him out for a while. 

Kuroo nudges him with his elbow. “What’s up with you today?” 

“I don’t know,” he says quietly. “I had a really weird dream.”

“What?” Kuroo laughs and takes a bite of his lunch. “ _That’s_ what’s been bothering you?”

“Well, yeah.”

“People dream about weird shit all the time.” He swallows the rest of his _onigiri_ in one bite. “See, one time I had this dream where I was a spy/assassin/thing and you drove my getaway car…”

Kenma shrugs and allows himself to tune Kuroo out once again, focusing instead on the details of last night -- the cold, strange unfamiliarity he’d felt, the jarring sensation of seeing his room distorted into something just about recognizable. _I_ do _know you._

“Oy, Kenma.”

“It was just very… real.” 

“Yeah, and you know what else is real?” 

Kenma doesn’t bother answering, and sure enough, the question’s just a device to needle him: 

“The morning practice you skipped today. The extremely important drills you missed.”

Sometimes, Kenma wishes Kuroo would take him seriously -- just once in a while, because Kenma is not the kind of person who _should_ be taken seriously (contrary to popular opinion). He knows that this is just Kuroo’s way of going about things; he nudges Kenma to his feet when he’s down, sometimes literally, and never gently. 

And it’s not like Kenma minds. After all these years, it’d just be awkward if they started having sentimental conversations about dreams and loneliness. It’s not like they’re not honest with each other, and it’s not like they don’t share each other’s problems. But Kenma can’t imagine any sort of universe where he could just spit out his insecurities, and where Kuroo would do the same to him. 

Kenma wonders if Kuroo ever broods about these inane sorts of things for hours on end -- he just seems too damn busy to. And if he ever did, he never once has told Kenma about it. 

“Listen -- you’re going to make it up this afternoon, okay? Do some extra receive practice so you don’t fail us when you’re in the back line.”

 _That_ jolts him back to reality. “What? I haven’t missed morning practice once this term.”

“Yes, but we also have Nationals in three weeks.”

“I hardly ever miss receives. I’m not going to start now.”

“Nerves are a thing, Kenma.”

“Please. I deal with them enough every time I go to the fucking cash register.”

Kuroo snorts out a laugh at that one. “Master your convenience-store anxiety and you’ll never experience performance nerves again!”

Kenma resists a groan, but somehow, his mood has picked up a little. He supposes he shouldn’t be surprised -- this is Kuroo’s specialty, after all. 

“Kenma!”

The locker room’s door bursts open. Kuroo stands in the doorway, chest heaving, pointing an umbrella at him like a sword in one of his RPGs.

“Good, you haven’t left,” Kuroo wheezes. “I had to sprint around the school to get here.”

Kenma takes the umbrella. It’s one of Kuroo’s, bright blue with ridiculous octopus cartoons printed all over it. If they were going to make it water-themed, it might as well be a cuter animal. 

“Where were you? Why’d you leave practice early?”

“Meeting with my teacher.”

“As late as this?”

Kuroo shrugs, pulling out his own umbrella (jellyfish-themed). “He’s the basketball coach. He said I could meet him after practice.”

Kenma walks out of the locker room, knowing Kuroo will follow; all the same, he listens for the familiar click as he locks the door and shuts off the lights. The sound of the storm hits them in full now that they’re outside, and Kenma struggles briefly with the wind before opening his octopus umbrella. It really is quite tacky. 

“I did your dumb receive drills,” Kenma says as they near the school gates. “After you _left early_.”

Kuroo shoves him sideways, and Kenma is briefly splattered with rain. “Cut me some slack, you… you volleyball delinquent. I have future stuff to think about.”

“What the fuck is a volleyball delinquent?” snorts Kenma. 

“Exactly what it sounds like.”

He considers responding, but his mind is too busy taking a complete tangent into the idea of _future stuff_ and what it entails that there isn’t much room left for a witty retort. 

“Have you decided yet?” A fat droplet of water rolls off the umbrella and lands on Kuroo’s shoulder. “On a first-choice university.”

“I don’t really know.”

“So you haven’t.”

“Mm…”

“You’re the one who’s always telling me not to procrastinate.”

They leave the school grounds, and as the rain begins to fall harder Kenma steps closer to Kuroo. Kenma doesn’t fancy walking all the way to the train station when it’s this nasty outside. 

“I might go far.” 

Kuroo’s words are quiet enough that they’re very nearly carried away by the droplets raining down on them, but still casual as ever. Kenma tries to squash the sudden wave of fear that grabs his ribcage and speaks measuredly:

“Like… Japan far? Or abroad far?”

“It depends.”

“On?”

“I don’t know. My parents. My major. The local universities I get accepted into.”

Kuroo keeps fiddling with the damp cuffs of his jacket and casting glances at the storm clouds, as if they would blow the time away for them. Kenma can’t find it in him to say anything. The only thing he can think of is _what about me?_

But he can’t say that. Not just because it’d be clingy and rude, but because Kuroo has been molding his life around him for as long as he can remember. It’s their lunchtime conversation a thousand times over -- Kuroo doing some stupid, subtle antics for his sake, and Kenma not possibly seeing what he could do in return. If Kenma asks Kuroo to stay, he just might, and Kenma may be a lot of things, but he is not and will never be a burden. 

“Man, am I glad to be out of that rain.” Kuroo pulls the umbrella out of Kenma’s hand, and only then does he realize they’ve reached the train station. “I wonder what our country bumpkins over in Miyagi do when it’s like this it.”

“Their homes aren’t as far,” Kenma points out, grateful for the distraction. “Besides, I don’t think Shouyou really cares. He probably races Kageyama home all the same.”

“I don’t think Hinata would notice if a bullet blew a hole in him as long as he’s playing volleyball.”

Kenma makes some sort of noise of assent, not really listening as Kuroo goes off about some crazy story he heard from the Karasuno captain. Eventually, Kuroo trails off, and Kenma pretends to be occupied with wringing the water from his jacket sleeve. 

“Hey, Kenma,” Kuroo finally says once they’re at the platform, but doesn’t finish his sentence. Kenma doesn’t prompt him further -- he’s not sure he wants to hear what’s coming next. 

He mumbles something as the train rolls into the station, but Kenma can’t quite catch it as the crowd jostles them aboard. Kuroo tries again once they’re on the train. 

“Kenma --”

“ _What?”_ He says it loud enough that a few heads turn, and he coughs awkwardly. 

Kuroo continues in a whisper:

“Inuoka’s birthday is on Saturday. Should we celebrate Friday after practice or…?”

Kenma stares at him.

“What?”

That is the question, Kenma muses. What had he been expecting to hear? Some disgusting part of him, maybe, wanted its fears assuaged: _I’m not going anywhere._

“Yeah. I don’t think enough of the team will be free Saturday,” he finally manages.

“Let me check with them,” says Kuroo, completely unconcerned as he pulls out his phone. 

What a lazy smile. Kenma resists the urge to pull it off his face -- it shouldn’t be that easy to slip away from worry and frustration. At least, it shouldn’t be so hard for Kenma if it’s so easy for him.

“Oh, Yaku is telling me we have test prep…? Shit, apparently so. I forgot to check my own calendar,” Kuroo rambles on in a low mumble. Kenma wishes he would shut up. “Friday it is, then. You’re free?”

Kenma nods, and is alarmed to find that he is suddenly having trouble breathing. He’s even more alarmed to find that his first thought is _don’t let Kuroo know._

Thank God he’s quiet now, at least, and there aren’t any eyes on them. Kenma pretends to play a game on his phone but is internally battling whatever invisible force has taken control of his lungs. Kuroo ( _don’t think about him_ ) had told him, long ago, to think of it as fighting a final boss, and that the pressure in his chest was only a superpower he had to best (don’t _think about him)_ and he’d said -- what had he said? -- … the crowd was slowly suffocating him, he only had to last until that familiar female voice announced Kuroo’s stop ( _DON’T THINK ABOUT HIM)_ , and then he’d leave for cram school, and then Kenma would be free. 

But even though Kenma makes it out of the train, even though he makes it home, even though he even manages to get in bed at a reasonable time, the weight doesn’t leave him. An uncomfortable sense of dread settles on him like a lead blanket as he falls asleep, but it’s not like he’s unused to it…

_(Kenma is walking to school alone, on the first day of his third year. He thinks he should be calling someone, but who, he doesn’t know…_

_Kenma is walking to school alone, on the first day of second year. The sun is well into the sky, and for some reason he feels like he should be up much earlier, home much later…_

_Kenma is walking to school alone, on the first day of junior high. He kneads an eraser in his palm, anxious, trying to wish away the pain in his chest…_

_Kenma is walking to school alone on the first day of elementary school. Kenma is walking to school alone on the first day of kindergarten. Kenma is walking alone… )_

Kenma wakes up with a start. He’s surprised to find that his cheeks are dry -- he rarely gets nightmares, but they never fail to leave him in tears. But this time, he can’t even remember what he was dreaming about. 

He only has the sense that something very, very, bad is about to happen.

. . .

SEPTEMBER 14 2013 5:51 PM

“Ten more days.”

Kuroo proclaims this ominously from where he’s curled up beside Kenma on his bed (he couldn’t be bothered to fight him onto the floor but was in no way willing to compromise his space). Kenma looks up from his video game, but Kuroo is only staring at the opposite wall with a thoughtful frown. 

“Ten more days until what?” Kenma asks, taking the bait. 

“My vacation ends on the 24th. I’m going back to uni.”

Kenma has forgotten that Kuroo exists outside of their strange time-warped limbo. It’s not hard to think that Kuroo is just a figment of his imagination, a manifestation of all his insecurities with the sole purpose of bothering him through his third year. But no, Kuroo has a family and a future, and that future involves him taking a train in ten days to Osaka.

“Well, that’ll mark an end to the strangest period of my life.”

“Who says I’m going _back?_ ” 

Kenma doesn’t have to ask which _back_ he means -- back to uni, or back to where he belonged. The _back_ where Kenma was in his phone contacts and a volleyball uniform hung in the closet currently containing only a school uniform and casual clothes.

“You will eventually. It’s stupid to imagine that we’d be stuck like this forever.”

“Everything that’s happened these few weeks has been stupid.” Kuroo tugs on the hem of Kenma’s sweatshirt. “More likely, you just can’t wait to get rid of me.”

Kenma isn’t sure if this is true or not. He is not unhappy right now -- in fact, he would go so far as to say that he enjoys Kuroo’s company during moments like this. But his presence is forever and uncomfortably intertwined with the idea of this other Kenma. The volleyball star, the loved-by-all golden boy. At least, that’s how he seems when Kuroo describes him. 

“I’m sure you’re missed very much by the other Kenma right now,” he says finally. 

“I guess,” says Kuroo distantly. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t.”

This takes Kenma by surprise. “But you guys are best friends.”

“Well, yeah, but… it’s sort of hard to explain. He’s like you.”

“Well, we _are_ kind of the same person.”

Kuroo rolls his eyes at the ceiling. “He marches to the beat of his own drum. I get the feeling that the world could end and he’d go about life the same way, but if I’m separated from him, I melt into a puddle of self-pity within hours.”

“I mean, you don’t know. You can’t see into his head -- or mine.”

“You’d be surprised.” Kuroo laughs briefly, but his face settles back into that frown that looks so wrong on his face. “I guess it should be a good thing, but look at me… and look at you.”

Kenma does, staring at his hands curled up in front of him. He is… what? _Totally fine_ , Kuroo’s voice says, a little bit too nonchalant, face turned away. 

“It’s not the same,” Kenma finds himself saying. “I forgot you, so I can’t miss you. If we were in the same boat, I’d probably be just as not-fine as you.”

“See, that’s the thing. I don’t think you would.”

“You’re not --”

“Sorry. It’s kind of fucked-up to wish you were unhappy, right?”

“I still think you’re being kind of unreasonable about this.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I am.” Maybe Kuroo is angry, but he just sounds defeated, running his hands through his already-messy hair. “But maybe if I was reasonable about things I wouldn’t be here in the first place.”

“You didn’t choose for this to happen…”

“But what if I did?” 

There’s a brief silence, and Kuroo doesn’t break eye contact with him the entire time. His gaze is resolute, but his chin is trembling.

“I don’t know what you’re implying,” says Kenma, sitting up a little straighter, “but I don’t think you’re the sort of person to wish yourself into nonexistence. Unless you are, in which case…”

“No. You’re right.” He clears his throat. “But, um… I don’t know. Third year was hard. I don’t think you realized the disproportionality of our relationship with each other.”

“You’re definitely overthinking this.”

Kuroo groans. “I feel like I’m talking to a wall. Can we just accept my perceptions being realistic as an axiom and move on?”

“What the hell is an axiom?”

Kuroo buries his head in the sheets. “Fuck it, Kenma. I’m not even going to try and explain.”

“No, no. You don’t get to say that.”

“I can say whatever I want!”

Kenma sits up and shakes Kuroo’s shoulder, but he doesn’t lift his head.

“You can’t just tell me cryptic stuff like that and then say you’re not going to explain. How -- and why -- would you ever wish yourself into nonexistence? And then why the hell did you come back?”

It comes out wrong, totally wrong, but Kenma hadn’t been thinking straight and now it sounds like the opposite of what he’d meant to say. He wishes that just for one minute, he could speak without the words getting mangled between his brain and his mouth. 

Kuroo still hasn’t moved his head from the pillow, but his shoulders are trembling a little bit, and Kenma thinks that maybe he is crying. Great. Just great. 

“Kuroo…” he says, which only makes him tremble harder, “I didn’t mean it like it was bad for you to come back or anything. You know I wouldn’t say that.”

“I know,” comes the muffled response.

“Were you really that upset? Did you really think that it was such a big deal that you were… what, dependent on me?”

“It is arguably the worst feeling in the world. You don’t get it.”

“You know what? I don’t,” Kenma sighs, slumping back so that his head thumps gently against the headboard. “I don’t get it because I never had a best friend. Okay? Never in my whole life. So you can tell me everything you want about friendship and dependency and I’ll eat it up, because I don’t know jack shit about what you’re talking about.”

Kuroo huffs into the sheets, and Kenma suddenly feels guilty. This isn’t supposed to be about him.

“But… I’m sorry. If I really was treating you so badly that you felt worthless enough to disappear.”

“You never treated me badly. You treated me really well.”

“Yeah, it’s clear through your sky-high self-esteem.”

“That’s my problem, not yours.”

“It is my problem at this point. You’ve been practically living in my house for the past three weeks. I just… why is it such a big deal if you rely on other people?”

“It’s unbalanced,” mumbles Kuroo. “It’s like you have me dangling off a string. You could go anywhere, and I’d always come back to you.”

 _I’d always come back to you._ The words do something strange to him -- they burrow deep inside his stomach and root themselves there, filling his entire chest with warmth. They aren’t words he’d ever expected to hear. 

“You… came back. Something happened to you that made you -- wish yourself into non-existence, I guess, but you came back. To a me that never had you to begin with.”

“Yeah, but I just don’t know how to do anything else. The other Kenma moves on with life, you move on with life eventually, and where does that leave me?”

 _Stuck in limbo,_ is the unspoken answer. _Floating between worlds without a name._

“I think you have to wait,” says Kenma. “Give yourself a little time to be alone, and when you finally take that train home, you’ll find that you were undervaluing yourself.”

“How would you know, Kenma? How could you know --”

“I _know,”_ he says, closing his eyes and letting his head knock gently against the headboard, “because he and I are still the same person. And I -- maybe it’s just because this is something I’ve never had, but _I_ think you’re undervaluing yourself. I don’t think feeling the way you do makes you a worse person -- I don’t think giving your whole self to others the way you do can make _anyone_ okay with leaving you.”

Kenma releases a shuddering sigh. He’s said too much, and he’s said enough of his own thoughts that the others -- the fragments and worries and hauntings of the past that never was that swim around in his head -- clamor to be released, too, into the sticky summer air between him and Kuroo. 

“If you don’t think it’s so bad to be like me, then why -- after everything -- are you still like this?”

Kenma pauses. “I don’t --”

“Don’t think I haven’t noticed,” says Kuroo quietly.

“Noticed what?” asks Kenma, struggling to keep his voice even. Kuroo doesn’t respond. “Don’t pull this, Kuroo. Just tell me.”

“You’re like him. Why won’t you return to me what I’ve given you?”

Kenma wants to shake Kuroo and scream at him that he’s wrong about everything. He wants to wrench him upright and face him head-on, he wants to shout at Kuroo until Kuroo shouts back. 

Instead, his eyes burn with tears.

Kenma lies down on his side so that if it becomes worse at least Kuroo won’t see him. Kenma is having trouble thinking, having trouble not crying. 

“Don’t even bother trying to hide from me,” says Kuroo from just behind him. A hair short of too close. 

Kenma doesn’t want to care. He has resolutely avoided letting Kuroo become to him what he’s sure he is to Kuroo -- an anchor of sorts, a pillarto lean on. It’s only ever been about protecting Kuroo from the world in which he doesn’t belong, But really, it didn’t matter what he did to Kuroo, because Kenma had just been protecting himself. 

Drawing away, walling up and making boundaries and schooling himself into preventing attachment to someone who was going to leave anyway -- it is this, certainly, that broke Kuroo in the first place. Here or elsewhere, Kenma was still Kenma, and he knows with absolute certainty that if nothing else, he has the power to hurt. 

“Forgive me if your habits have changed,” Kuroo says quietly. “but is it okay for me to hug you?”

He doesn’t want to care, but he _does._ And he’s practical enough to realize when he’s lost the battle.

“Yeah.”

The weight that settles on his torso is completely unfamiliar, but it sends _something_ coursing through him -- a sort of realization, a could-have-been that takes him by the ears and shakes him ruthlessly. Somewhere out there, Kuroo’s Kenma has had these hands stroking his hair for his entire life.

Why had he pushed Kuroo away so vehemently in those first few days? Force of habit? Or a fear of something he couldn’t name even now? Kuroo’s arms wrap tightly around his waist, a closeness of bodies he has never known.

Kenma has forgotten how to cry silently. 

Kuroo leaves for the station in one day. Kenma has made a no-electronics pact, the result of which has his phone out of reach on a shelf only Kuroo can reach and a deck of cards sliding apart on his bedspread. His reflexes are much faster than Kuroo’s, which is something of a balm to the vague feeling he has of being impaled through his lungs. 

(Kuroo is leaving for the station in one day. Kenma is certain that he will never come back -- at least, not to him.)

“You need to get your eyes checked. Or at least learn your shapes,” Kenma says, drawing the suite he’s just slapped into his pile with as much smugness as he can muster. He meets Kuroo’s permanently squinty eyes and reconsiders. “Actually, you definitely have glasses that you have but don’t use.”

Kuroo blinks at him. “You’re actually totally right.”

Kenma shrugs; the motion feels mechanical. “Your narcissism just shines through your every facet of your being.”

“So, if I’m interpreting this correctly, you appreciate my handsome face and beautiful eyes? Am I a post-transformation TV-drama girl to you?”

Kenma doesn’t know best friends, but he knows what a voice injected with false bravado sounds like. He holds back a smile. 

“I don’t know. I would appreciate it if you quoted an obscure poet whom I also happen to read in my extensive free time.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I have some chemical formulas for you instead. For instance, I would postulate that you are severely lacking in docosahex--”

“--anoic acid.” Kenma slaps, drawing out the sequence of five he’s managed to snatch from under Kuroo’s nose, and tries to rid himself of the feeling that his stomach has physically dissociated from the rest of his body the second he’d spoken without thinking. “Brain function. I know… things.”

He has definitely not learned this in school. And Kenma doesn’t do reading, like, at all. 

“That’s like. The only random chemical I do know,” Kuroo says, and now his voice is not filled with false bravado. It is just small. “Why do you know it?”

Kenma shrugs jerkily again. He wishes his joints would agree on coordinated movement with the rest of his body. “I spend a lot of time on Wikipedia.”

Kuroo doesn’t question it. Hesitantly, he puts down a card, but it’s useless, and they both stare at it while Kenma stalls his turn. 

“When… earlier.” Kenma idly shuffles the downturned cards in his hand. “I told you -- who you were, where this was. That I was not him, and that he is -- somewhere, I guess. Waiting. And you’re going now to -- all of that. Why did you believe me?”

“Why is your question worded like that?”

“Just answer it,” Kenma snaps.

“I guess it was the volleyball club,” says Kuroo, staring at the cards, after a moment. “You always acted lazy about it, but it was always… well. You -- at the risk of sounding terribly overdramatic --the first time you reluctantly braved the great outdoors to play volleyball with me literally changed my life. If volleyball wasn’t there, then I wasn’t there -- and if I wasn’t there, then volleyball wasn’t there.”

“It’s okay to be overdramatic. You sound more like the drama protagonist of my dreams,” Kenma says dryly, but he is actually feeling the opposite of that; he is bleeding out. “That’s a good reason.”

“Are you--?” Kuroo’s voice pitches upwards. “Do you think --”

Kenma flips his card onto the pile. It’s a sandwich. Kuroo, who’s been staring at the pile this whole time, reaches it at the exact same time he does. 

“I guess I’ll let you have it this time,” Kenma mutters, but when he tries to pull away his hand, he finds that Kuroo is holding it fast. 

“Kenma. I leave tomorrow.”

“I know.” _You don’t need to remind me._

“I -- if there’s any chance --”

“It was a good reason,” Kenma grinds out. “You gave a good reason.”

“-- I want to be honest with you.” Kuroo’s fingers lock with Kenma’s, and it’s more out of instinct than anything else that Kenma tightens his grip in return. It’s instinct, and that’s the scary part. “I might never, otherwise.”

He knows Kuroo; he understands. Kuroo’s knees will bend the cards with his knees when he comes close, so Kenma sweeps them to the side. His chest, lungs, and frantic heart, for once, are still. Kuroo knows; he understands. 

They kiss. It’s simple, and that’s the scary part. 

“Twelve years is as long as I’ve known you.” _Not me,_ Kenma screams _._ “If you were wondering how long I’ve been thinking about this.”

This isn’t right. This feels like deception. But if there is one thing Kenma can steal, he wants it. He wants Kuroo’s first -- any first. If it means he will be wanting the second for the rest of his life, then so be it. 

“I want to tell you. I want to make it real. I just --” Kuroo’s hands hold his shoulders in the gentlest grip. “If you -- we never -- there were a lot of things we never -- things that went unsaid. And if I had said them, if I’d just been brave enough to face you, then maybe I wouldn’t have -- maybe I would be--”

“I am the one who wants this,” Kenma feels like he’s talking backwards, like the words from his deepest insides are spilling folded the wrong side out. “And I am only getting to want it because you… were you. Because you didn’t say whatever it is you regret not saying. If this is the me you want, then have at it.”

“There is no -- whatever. It’s you.” Kuroo’s head dips towards Kenma’s, so that the next words are warm brushes on his lips. “To me, it’s always just you.”

Kenma wonders of infinite bodies and infinite tumbles to backs on beds. Hands on jaws. Shuddering breaths. He wonders how it could be that the space between them had never meant to exist. He wonders how it is that he was made to fit any pieces but these. 

**. . .**

JANUARY 16 2013 2:17 AM

Kenma would tell Kuroo to stop crying, but he is also crying, and _the town just blew up_ and Kenma cannot breathe out of his left nostril anymore. It’s around two in the morning, and if Kuroo’s mock exam hadn’t been canceled there’s no way they’d be able to sit here killing time like this. But here they are. 

“I can’t believe we’re losing it over some stupid shoujo movie,” Kuroo sniffles. On screen, Mitusha begins to cry for about the eightieth time (not like they can judge).

“Shut up, it’s getting to the good part,” says Kenma.

Kuroo tugs the blanket tighter around the two of them, and Kenma leans towards him so that they’re both completely covered. By the time Taki glimpses Mitsuha in the train window, Kenma is too tired to properly follow what’s happening. He registers that it’s a little weird for him to be so close to Kuroo, but it’s okay. It doesn’t mean anything if it’s just Kuroo.

 _“What’s your name?”_ Taki shouts to Mitsuha, and Kenma blearily follows the swing of a red hair ribbon back and forth, back and forth.

_“What’s your name?”_

_“My name is…”_

The train rushes by -- but didn’t Taki and Mitsuha already go on the train? -- and there, from the platform, a voice calls out -- but nobody was on the platform -- a familiar grin, a coffee-stained picture…everything is wrong, all wrong -- he suddenly recalls a nightmare with an eraser, a late morning _(DON’T THINK ABOUT HIM)_ , but like grasping at a twilight dream, it disappears, and then everything is light again.

“Woah. Woah, Kenma. Rein it in.” 

He can vaguely hear Kuroo saying something-or-other beside him, sounding mildly panicked, and as he gathers himself he realizes it’s because tears are streaming down his face and he is gasping for breath.

“Okay, okay. No more movies. Done.”

Kuroo turns off the TV and throws the remote across the room. Kenma wants to tell him that he’s _fine,_ that he doesn’t know where this came from but it sure as hell wasn’t Taki and Mitsuha’s sappy love story, but all he manages is a pathetic sob.

Kuroo awkwardly extracts his arm from the blanket to wrap it around Kenma, and (even though he isn’t really upset) Kenma burrows into the warmth. _This isn’t weird at all_ , Kenma tells himself again. _It’s just Kuro._

“Shh, okay. Are we good?”

Kenma takes a deep breath. “Sorry,” he croaks. 

“The movie was over anyway.” After a pause, he asks, “What happened?”

“Um, I just… I fell asleep, probably. I don’t really know.”

What he _does_ know is that Kuroo’s hand is gently rubbing his shoulder, and he can visualize the shape of it, long, veined, twisting. It’s so easy, curled up together like this, to lower himself into the warm cradle of Kuroo’s chest and arms. His breathing rises and falls like the ebb and surge of waves beneath Kenma. He smells like soap and cotton.

Even after he’s done crying he can’t bring himself to move, and Kuroo doesn’t stop him. They are still in the half-light of Kuroo’s room.

He considers voicing what he fears out loud, but it would sound incredibly stupid: _Kuro, I’ve been having bad dreams lately and I think it’s because I’m too attached to you. Kuro, I feel like something really bad is going to happen… or maybe I’m just too scared of you leaving._

He snorts out a laugh at the last one (probably because it’s true), and he can feel Kuroo shift above him to peer down at the top of his head. 

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing,” sneers Kuroo, a poor imitation. “You’re just too lazy to tell me the joke.”

“I don’t think you’d understand it.”

Kuroo gives a little sigh, and although Kenma can’t see much more than the red of his T-shirt, he can predict the expressions that match his little gestures: hesitation, unease. It’s a little pathetic, how attuned he is. 

“I can’t believe this is all going to be over two months.” 

The heaviness in Kuroo’s voice is completely alien, and Kenma knows it means nothing good when he gets serious like this. He inhales soap and cotton and waits for whatever sentimental bomb hangs over them to drop.

“I just stopped crying. Can we not talk about this?”

“Crying over a movie and crying about life are different.”

“Moot point. Crying is crying.”

“And life is life.”

“What wisdom,” mumbles Kenma, letting his eyes droop shut. But of course Kuroo won’t let him off with a peaceful sleep and some well-deserved cuddling.

“I’ve been a zombie, walking around back and forth taking tests and getting ready for college and...It’s nice to be able to kick back and relax again with you.”

Kenma makes some sort of noise of assent. He liked kicking back and relaxing better when he didn’t feel like the ground was going to open up beneath him and swallow him whole. 

“Kenma, do you ever feel tired? Like, really tired?”

“How do you think I’m feeling right now?”

Kuroo nudges him, and Kenma presses closer into his chest (this _still_ isn’t weird at all). “Take me seriously. I mean. like, so tired you could disappear?”

 _Take me seriously. Take_ me _seriously,_ he thinks vehemently, _I don’t want to do this. I don’t want this to happen._

 _“Ken_ ma.”

“Maybe,” he says finally. 

“That’s not a good answer.”

“You don’t get to decide.”

“Yes, I do.”

“You don’t.”

“I’m going to be deep now, so listen properly, okay?” says Kuroo, ignoring the cue to start bantering, and Kenma feels surprisingly hurt. 

“Sometimes I think I’d just evaporate off the face of the earth if it wasn’t for you, Kenma.”

He almost doesn’t hear Kuroo. He almost doesn’t process what he said. But in the time it takes for him to register it, for his breath to catch deep in his chest, Kuroo has already started speaking again. 

“I know I’ve been acting all normal about leaving and all that. Well — because you have. You’re the same as always, but I — I — ”

Kenma isn’t the same as always. It’s taken a superhuman effort to appear so nonchalant, apathetic, fine either and any way. It’s at least a relief to know that he’s believable. 

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Kuroo confesses.

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, I don’t either,” says Kuroo shortly. 

Kenma summons the massive effort to speak -- if Kuroo is baring himself, then why can’t he?

“Am I keeping you anywhere?”

“Huh?”

Kenma wrenches himself upright, and the blanket stretches taut, too far knotted between them to slip over to either one. He can’t put his thoughts into words. He imagines Kuroo waiting for him in the rain, catering to every useless whim, and then gone. 

“What, Kenma?”

They are intertwined as they are now, not just limbs and blankets but heartbeats, anxieties. _It’s not weird at all,_ that voice insists, but how else could he explain this? This isn’t normal. This isn’t what best friends do. Kenma knows he’s not normal (he’s the polar fucking opposite of normal) but this is different than just him. This is bigger than him. 

He is unquestionably and unavoidably in love with Kuroo Tetsurou.

And in the midst of this decade-late realization, Kuroo barrels on.

“Will you just --” 

He breaks off, grappling with something Kenma can only guess at. There’s a certain sort of pain in his expression -- Kenma would describe it as anguish, but it’s mellower than that. Anguish that’s been worn down by the sandpaper of a bottled-up throat. 

“Why don’t you get it?” he says after a long while, sounding deflated more than anything. “You’ve always been -- you’re so much tougher than me.”

Kenma is small and slouched over and fatigued. He is socially anxious and easily overwhelmed. But Kuroo is the one who hung around the corner between their blocks just so that he’d have an excuse to walk with him to school, constantly sidling through doorways and windows with a facile smile, an unconcerned drawl. But all the same, his hand was always reaching for something to hold on to. 

And finally, Kenma begins to understand.

Kenma’s hair is growing too fast for his liking.

He stands in front of the mirror, blowing at the dusty surface but achieving nothing but a nasty cough, and settles for rhythmically opening and closing the small silver scissors in his hand instead. He takes comfort in the slight resistance the old blades give him when he pulls them all the way open, and the way they snip perfectly closed around locks of blond hair.

Forty-eight minutes ago he texted Kuroo -- _I’m cutting my hair --_ but he still hasn’t responded, so Kenma went ahead and did it regardless. He’s always cut his own hair anyway. It’s not that big of a deal, he says to himself soundlessly, watching his dusty replica in the glass mouth the words back at him. It’s not such a big deal.

(In his mind’s eye, a ten-year-old Kuroo hovers behind him as if his presence could glue Kenma’s hair back if he cut it badly. His voice is a constant stream of worry and harsh warnings -- _you’re going to screw it up at least let your mother do it for you --_

but it had all gone without a hitch, and since then he’s flipped through comic books and tossed volleyballs while Kenma cut his hair, silently, patiently, never making a single error.) 

He’s less than five snips from being done when his phone buzzes. He starts so badly that the scissors cut a jagged stripe behind his ear and a crooked clump falls to the floor.

Kenma casts a glance at his phone before panic really starts to set in -- ‘ _sorry was packing, i’m sure it went well as always’._ The brazen kind of encouragement typical of Kuroo seems so disorienting now. Right there, as he stares at the color draining from his reflection and the crooked line half-hidden by the rest of his neatly trimmed hair, Kenma’s stubborn screen is finally cracked by one of a thousand miniature bombshells.

The air leaves his lungs in one impossibly huge breath. Diagrams from Kuroo’s notes swarm in his mind; he vaguely recalls that exhaling is the movement of air to an area of lower pressure, that the capillaries in the lungs can be only one cell wide, that Kuroo is leaving and he is _never coming back._

Somehow, Kenma finds his bed and crawls inside it, burrowing himself inside his quilt until he can’t see anything but folds of fabric, can’t hear anything but the sounds of his own shaky breaths. Anything to shut all this noise out once again. 

He’s used to running things over and over again in his head until they become worn and smooth. He’s used to the cavity in this bed that has become hollowed out with the weight of his endless worries. But he’s also used to familiarity and the sensation of a steady pulse, of a strong spine, and of a healthy mind.

Kenma’s hand finds the narrow patch of near-bare scalp and runs his finger over it, realizing the surety of everything he’s been worrying about, certain as the lack of hair behind his ear and the words that glow bright and beckoning on his phone screen. He is dizzy, the adrenaline crashing in the pit of his gut although this is hardly something to be panicking about. His life is not in danger. 

But the longer he’s silent, the louder those whispers get -- the ones that have been skirting his conscious in the transient moments between sleep and waking, the little fingers that tickle him with the slightest sense of dread:

_“Just my best friend.” “If I could have, I would have.” “Don’t even bother trying to hide from me.”_

“Shut up,” Kenma whispers to no one in particular.

A blurry image flashes through his mind -- sharp teeth, a familiar smirk -- but before he can place it it disappears. 

_“I_ do _know you.”_

“Shut up,” he repeats, trying to stop his hands from shaking so violently. 

_“I know you better than anyone else on this damn planet.”_

“SHUT UP!” 

The cry tears itself from Kenma’s chest more than he speaks it himself. He yanks himself upright, confronted by the sudden silence of the room around him. Had he been dreaming? Those voices…

Kenma has never been able to remember the words from his dreams, but now the quiet unease and sense of loneliness that have been slowly suffocating him condense into something tangible.

Kuroo is leaving and he is never coming back. He is _never coming back again._ Or perhaps the phrase is that he is being erased -- he is slipping from Kenma’s life as quickly and painlessly as the locks of blond hair on the floor, leaving behind only a hollow that Kenma would never know was supposed to be full.

_“If it wasn’t for you, I think I’d evaporate off the face of the earth, Kenma.”_

Kenma feels sick. Had Kuroo really meant it when he’d said those words? Or had he, too, been sensing a future he couldn’t control?

His heartrate is skyrocketing, but it’s a panic he’s familiar with, no longer the fear of something he could never place his finger on. And maybe it’s this familiarity that propels him backward into simpler days, when his first course of action was always to call Kuroo. 

“ _Hello?”_ Kuroo answers sleepily, despite the late hour.

“Kuro,” is all he can manage. “Are you busy?”

_“No, no, I’m -- it doesn’t matter, anyway. Is everything okay?”_

The more Kuroo speaks, the more Kenma can feel the edge of another memory-premonition nearing, just out of reach. He wants to grab hold of it more than anything -- he’s sure that this is what he’s been missing.

“I’m okay.” When Kenma says it aloud, it feels truer. “I’m okay.”

_“Kenma, I’m serious, if something’s up --”_

“I’m totally fine. Just keep talking.” He’s so close, so close.

 _“Oh -- alright.”_ Kuroo obviously doesn’t believe him, but he thankfully keeps talking. _“Did your haircut go well? I mean, it’s not like there’s much to get wrong. But. Uh.”_

“Keep going,” Kenma hisses. He’s onto something with the haircut.

_“I was thinking, if you dyed your hair again, that might be cool, you know? You once mentioned pink hair, I think that might suit you. Pastel, though. I don’t see you doing neon, although if you want to I’m not one to stop you.”_

Kenma stops listening to the actual words he’s speaking and instead focuses on the cadence of his words, the muffled sound of his breathing. He tries so hard to envision something, _anything,_ but it’s like the moment he was able to see everything has passed. 

_“...Kenma?”_

“What? Sorry, I wasn’t…”

Kuroo is silent. 

“Kuro?”

_“No, never mind. It’s just --”_

“I’m sorry,” says Kenma suddenly, the first words he’s said with conviction for as long as he can remember. “I’m sorry that I didn’t take you seriously. When you said you were tired.”

It’s more than just that, but the connection between Kenma’s brain and his mouth has always been tenuous at best. For now, he’ll take it. 

_“That? That was nothing, we were both delirious on sleep deprivation.”_

“No, we weren’t. We were honest. And afraid.”

Kuroo sighs on the other end. 

“I’m sorry for how I treated you,” Kenma continues. “I walled up recently, I’ve been pushing you away, and I know how that makes you feel. I was just trying to protect myself, I guess, but it was at your cost. I’m sorry.”

“What is with all this apologizing?” Kuroo laughs, but it’s forced. “It’s okay. If anything, I shouldn’t be so dependent on your moods.”

 _Dependent._ Kenma hates that word, and the disgust with which Kuroo says it. Why isn’t he getting it?

Well, Kenma muses, if Kuroo did get it, they wouldn’t be stuck in this situation now. It’s not something Kenma can just make him understand. Kenma could tell Kuroo not to disappear, but it wouldn’t mean anything. It wouldn’t change the inevitable truth that they are being pulled apart without forewarning nor mercy, an end far less painful but far crueler than the one he’d been steeling himself for.

Is this punishment for their failure to cope with the looming prospect of spring and separation? Is this the forced end of a friendship locked so tightly that no natural circumstance could draw them apart? Or is this a test, for the both of them, of what they’d become in the wake of the removal of the anchor of their tied-together hearts?

 _Who am I without Kuro? Am I anyone at all?_ It seems that Kenma is soon to find out. 

“Can I come see you?” he asks. _One last time._

“Sure,” says Kuroo without hesitation, and Kenma smiles despite himself. 

He knows what he has to do. He knows from what drawer to pull the pictures, the one signed with their names and Kuroo’s stupid kaomoji, the baby picture, the cat picture. 

He slips in Kuroo’s door through the back, and halfway up the stairs he runs into him.

“Hey,” whispers Kuroo.

“Take this with you to uni.” Kenma presses the envelope into Kuroo’s palm without preamble. “You can’t open it until -- until you come back to Tokyo.”

“Okay.”

“Promise me.”

“Pinky swear.”

“And --”

Kenma throws his arms around Kuroo. He hears the low rumble of a laugh from Kuroo’s throat as he hugs him back. 

“I’m gonna miss you a whole fucking lot,” Kuroo sniffles (sniffling? Is Kuroo really the one crying now?).

“You’ll be okay.” Kenma is surprised to hear the words coming from his own mouth, but Kuroo makes a strange noise that sounds like a sob and buries his head in his shoulder. 

He has to be fine on his own. He _will_ be. And even though the worst is yet to come for the both of them, Kenma knows by some untraceable instinct that they will come together again, like fish in a whirlpool, drawn closer by the black hole of their fears. And that’s alright. It’s alright that it’s like that.

When Kenma wakes up the next morning, he is met once again with the frustrating sense of a long dream he couldn’t quite remember. But, for once, rather than anxious and lonely, he feels strangely at peace. 

**. . .**

SEPTEMBER 15 2013 4:43 PM

Kuroo accosts Kenma on the way home from the convenience store, and Kenma doesn’t even protest when he begins rooting through his stuff. He’s going to see it anyway -- the product of bad decision-making skills and sheer desperation.

“ _Hair dye?”_ screeches Kuroo so loudly that one of the neighbors actually sticks her head out the window. “In _pink?_ You? The king of not standing out?”

“It was a split-second decision.” He already regrets it. “I wasn’t really planning to dye it anytime soon…”

What he’d really wanted was a physical change of pace, something that would keep him occupied after Kuroo left (which was in three hours). He’d walked in envisioning a few volumes of a new manga and walked out with a box of hair dye. Pink hair dye. Which, looking back on it, he couldn’t possibly pull off.

“I know that look on your face. I’m not going to let you talk yourself out of the only good decision you’ve ever made,” says Kuroo, and Kenma tries his best to give him a withering look.

Fifteen minutes later, Kenma is sitting in front of his bathroom mirror on a stool Kuroo had pulled from who-knows-where. Kuroo pokes around in the cabinets, looking for hairdressing supplies or whatever the fuck he needs to ruin his hair. 

“I saw this coming, I totally saw this coming,” he practically sings. “You hated it when you dyed your hair blond, but I _knew_ it would grow on you. You stupid pudding-head.”

“Why did I do it if I hated it?”

“Yamamoto -- your teammate -- said you looked like a ghost with all that black hair swinging around. You tried to stand out less and ended up becoming the most noticeable member of the team.”

It always comes back to volleyball, doesn’t it?

“Why did _you_ do it, though, if you weren’t on the team? You wouldn’t have had any reason to,” asks Kuroo.

“I -- I don’t know.”

Kenma is overtaken by an irrational sense of fear that feels familiar in the most chilling way possible. It brings back a sense of slow-moving panic, the kind you get in dreams where you run but your legs aren’t moving, where there is light but you can’t see.

 _“Blond?! What the fuck, Kenma!” --_ voices he can’t place, grating on his ears, and then a single blurry flash of a crowded room filled with boys --

“Fuck.” That’s the third time he’s heard voices, and the first that he’s seen something that definitely does _not_ belong in his head. “ _Fuck_.”

“No going back now,” says Kuroo, still in that stupid fucking singsong, and why the hell is it so _familiar_?

Nothing makes sense. Not that Kenma has had much of a standard ever since Kuroo showed up in his life, but the explanation he’d clung to for so long definitely did not cover him having… memories. 

Kenma can’t remember why he dyed his hair blond. It was one of those things he never thought about, as natural as the color of his eyes or the sound of his voice, except for the mild sense of surprise he felt when he looked at his black mop in old pictures. Were there other things, too--?

“Are you going to rinse your hair yourself, or am I going to have to dunk you?”

“No.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“You oblivious fuck,” Kenma growls without thinking. 

“Woah. Are you angry?”

He is, and he doesn’t know why. Maybe it’s because the last of his remaining faith in reality is dissolving before his eyes. Or maybe it’s because every time Kuroo speaks or moves he can’t tell if he knows him or if he _knows_ him. In the way that he was supposed to all along.

“Kenma?”

“No hair dye,” he gets out. “No arguing. Sit down and shut up -- I need to think.”

And miraculously, perhaps realizing the gravity of the situation, Kuroo crosses his legs on the tiled floor and leans against the washing machine. 

_Were there other things that didn’t add up?_ But the harder Kenma tries, the harder it gets to even remember what he’s heard so far -- the background noise of somebody on the phone, the video game, and this, the blond hair. 

His gut lurches as he thinks about all the little pockets he might be missing of his life, a whole seventeen years of walking on fault lines that could open up any minute beneath him. The stories Kuroo told that left the bitter taste of jealousy at the back of his throat, the past he’d forbidden himself from imagining -- what if they had actually been his?

“Kuro,” he begins, turning around.

But he never gets to finish his sentence, because Kuroo’s head snaps up and his face is so wrecked that he knows something is wrong. 

“You called me Kuro.”

“I -- I did?” Even so, it’s just one letter, a slip of the tongue.

“It was what you used to call me,” explains Kuroo hurriedly, face flushing red even as he speaks. “And I thought -- just for a second --”

Well, that is the straw on the camel’s back. The ugly truth sits heavy at the bottom of Kenma’s stomach.

“You’re right.”

“What?”

“You were right from the start.” Kenma slips off the stool. “This is not the wrong me. I… forgot.”

Perhaps jumping to a few too many conclusions, Kuroo seizes him in his arms and kisses him.

“Stop,” says Kenma, gently pushing Kuroo’s face away from his own. “Wait. You have the wrong idea.”

“What could possibly be wrong about this?” he crows, leaning towards him again.

Kenma tries to dodge him but only ends up backed against the laundry machine, and settles for covering Kuroo’s mouth with two hands.

“I don’t remember you. If that’s what you were thinking.”

Kuroo shakes his head, his eyes bright. Kenma releases him somewhat warily and braces for another kiss (not that he’s particularly opposed, but they do need to talk this out).

“I’m just happy that this isn’t some strange foreign universe somewhere. 

“How did you figure it out?” he asks, almost as an afterthought. Kenma can’t believe it took him so long to ask.

“I started having sensory recollections -- your voice, my… teammates’ voices, and just now, some weird flashes of when I dyed my hair.” He clears his throat. “There’s no other explanation.”

“But you still don’t have your uniform, or a place on the team --”

“I know,” says Kenma, cutting him off, “and I don’t think that’s going to change. But it doesn’t have to be one past or another…”

He thinks about yesterday, when he’d asked for a good reason, so desperate to disallow himself from hope. There’s a good reason for many things, but only one place for this sure-as-heartbeat understanding. 

“I don’t know -- I don’t know how I could have presumed to know what happened to us. But it just can’t be that the place where you came from and the place where you are now aren’t connected. It’s possible that they’re even the same.”

Kuroo regards him seriously (for once). 

“So in the future, you might remember? And things will go back -- your closet will get a volleyball uniform, and the team will remember you, and…?”

“... It’s a possibility,” he concedes.

“You probably already are,” Kuroo continues, his voice pitching upwards in excitement, and Kenma hears an echo of a much younger voice. “You called me Kuro. That’s yours. You’re the only one who -- well, the old Kenma -- or both of you. You really _are_ the same.”

Kenma thinks back to a four-character scrawl and mutual confusion. 

“Wait. You remember that?”

“Remember what?”

“The nickname. You didn’t even know your full name. Kuroo Tetsurou. Kuro.”

“That’s right,” he says slowly. “I didn’t know it. But now I --” he gasps and leans in even closer to Kenma. “You gave me the pictures before I left. You said to open them when I got back for break.”

“I never --”

“You _did,”_ cries Kuroo. “You knew. You knew.”

“I knew that you were going to… you know…”

“You called me the night before I left. And I never remembered it until now, but you were being _so_ weird and apologizing and then you showed up and hugged me and gave me those pictures. And then it was just wiped from my memory. And then I guess I forgot my name, too.”

“I knew you were going to disappear.”

“No.” Kuroo grabs Kenma’s face and brings them nose to nose. “You knew I was going to come back.”

And when Kuroo leans in to kiss him again, Kenma can’t sense that familiar reluctance that he’s been shadowed by his whole life. This -- the banter, the relationship, the concept of Kuroo Tetsurou -- was all wrong; it wasn’t him. Kuroo had been the representative of a world of could-have-beens, a past that he loathed because he knew it would never be his. 

But now Kenma has let himself call Kuroo his own, and Kuroo has remembered his own name -- a chicken-and-egg situation, one leading to another, the genesis located somewhere in between. They are rooted in each other, and so what disappears is bound to come back to earth. 

Kenma cannot fear, now, the past that is his very own. He cannot fear the prospect of replicating Kuroo’s unflinching loyalty -- he cannot even imagine anything else. Kenma is what he was convinced he was not, and they are what could have been. 

He’s just going to have to live with that. 

**. . .**

AUGUST 09 2013 4:42 PM

Kenma is unused to irregularities. He is unused to interruptions on the train station platform, he is unused to being approached by strangers, and he is unused to dealing with their problems. Yet here he is, confronting all of those things at once --

**Author's Note:**

> I KNOW ITS CONFUSING. it is confusing even to me when i re-read it. i just didnt want it to rot in my drive forever lol. hopefully it was still a good read if you got this far though!


End file.
